Please critique

kelley_french · Oct 2, 2007

What could I of dsone better? This was take in April. We had a snow storm in Texas. Thanks for looking.

skieur · Oct 2, 2007

Anything that is out-of-focus in the foreground distracts the eye of the viewer away from the centre of interest and is a "no,no". The challenge in this kind of shot is to isolate the centre of interest and make sure it is totally in focus. A different angle and greater depth of field would have helped this shot.

skieur

Splouff · Oct 2, 2007

This shot doesn't work well for me.
It's difficult to say what you could have done better... find a better angle or use a even wider aperture?

Mesoam · Oct 2, 2007

not use flash...

kelley_french · Oct 3, 2007

Mesoam said:
not use flash...

I will keep that in mind. Thanks:thumbup:

cupidcutie4u · Oct 3, 2007

I agree, but still think its to cool! Because the leaves are so green, but theres snow still on them. It's something I haven't seen!!

Flash Harry · Oct 4, 2007

"find a better angle or use a even wider aperture?"

To have this subject in focus throughout it would be a narrower aperture, so, instead of shooting at f4 say you'd close down the aperture to f11 f16 f22 and have either a longer exposure or use flash. Try to get your advice correct folks, thats why shooters come on here. H

LaFoto · Oct 4, 2007

While the leaves (their colour! :lovey:

) are nice and the juxtaposition of them being so fresh and green yet being covered in freshly fallen flow is interesting, I don't think you made the most of it yet with this photo. The group of leaves that you chose to be your subject ("filtered" out of that cherry laurel [?] bush by use of focus and DOF) is in the very centre of your frame. That alone makes a photo as such more boring than it could have been otherwise, i.e. with the subject moved out of the centre. It is a fact. Unless there are clear symmetries for you to work with, centred photos lack the element of "tension" that off-centred photos have.

So the centredness is my one point of critique.

The other is the fact that there are so many distracting elements surrounding your subject. With a subject such as this one, I feel that my dad's advice to my sister and myself when we were little and started out with our first cameras (we each got a Rollei 35 back then) of "move close to your subject and fill the frame with it" would have applied here.

Depending on what camera you have, you can only move that close, of course, and I know that. Like with those Rollei 35 back then we could get as close as 70 cm and that was it. Anything nearer was automatically blurred. So back in film times, the most we could do was get as close as the lens would allow us, and maybe then order a print larger in size than we really wanted and apply the scissors to really cut the photo back to the size we had wanted, and thus lose all that we were forced to additionally put into the frame but didn't want to have there.

With digital photography and all the software that comes with it, things are ever so much easier today and you can crop your photos easily. So with this specific one, I feel that much of the blurred things at the bottom and equally much of the far-away things and the dark space on the right could go.

After that, the photo might develop an all different kind of dynamics.

One thing that has also been mentioned before, and that was my first (unfortunately negative) impression was the use of on-camera flash which gives the droplets this unnatural shadow ... when wide open aperture and ambient light still make the camera automatically switch on the flash, think of using a tripod instead.

kelley_french · Oct 4, 2007

Thank you this is why I come here. The advice that is given is great. I always take it in to concideration. Again thank you all.

ces · Oct 4, 2007

Looks like this shot was taken at night and needed flash. I think the idea of it is good, to capture one of those rare shots. A different time of day, morning, different angle for better composition, and stiking enhancement would work.